Your Monday Moment of Zen #2

“Then when all a person reads is rehabilitation material, they become hypnotized to only see things through that type of lens; reading about dysfunction begins to make you see dysfunction.”

Barry Kinsella of weightlifting epiphanies did a great interview with Glenn Pendlay about how to train the “weekend warrior” (you know, most of us!). The most important thing he says is that the lifters that do the best over the long haul, are those that can walk up to a heavy-ass weight (like 95% of max) and lift it without having the scream and yell and psych themselves up. Zen mind, strong legs!

Barry also did an interview with a masters lifter at Average Broz gymnasium in Las Vegas (where Pat Mendez trains). This guy is in his 50’s, and trains A LOT. So many people past the age of 30 have a can’t-do attitude about strength gaining and fitness. And this attitude becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Using mindfulness to cultivate internal peace reduces our own aggressiveness (and our less-than-ideal responses to what happens around us) and plugs us into the fundamental interconnectedness that underpins life as we know it.

In other words, meditate and you’ll be less of an asshole.

A while back I mentioned what I think is generally a good philosophy for a weightlifter to follow: Train as hard as you can, as often as you can, and spend the rest of your time working your ass off on recovery. Keats Snideman blogs about the last part.

Kathy of Kath Eats Real Food has a tribute to Oatmeal. Mmmm … When I was growing up, oatmeal was pretty much the only breakfast I ever ate. You’d think that would make me tired of it – you’d be wrong! (She’s got a TON of great recipes here.)

Here’s a video of someone doing the Whopper Challenge that I found on 70’s big. Quote:

The Whopper Challenge consists of a Triple Whopper, Double Whopper, Single Whopper, and Whopper Jr. in one sitting. There is an hour time limit, but Michael shrugged that off (Brent told him to) and finished in a smug 17 minutes. The meal netted Michael around 3100 calories.

We’ve got the “Tao of Mike Boyle.” Forewarning, very little Tao :), but still a good interview. My favorite:

The better the athlete the more self-impressed you are. They learn everything so easily and you start to think it’s you. “I’m an awesome coach because I can get that guy to do exactly what I want him to.” Listen, when you’re training a guy who’s projected in the first round, getting him into the first round isn’t a big accomplishment. That’s where he was supposed to go.

Training the highly talented is easy. It’s what you do with the less “gifted” that matters.

Here’s a research review looking at reasons why a lot of the research on endurance athletes and VO2 max aren’t always applicable to team sports and power sports. Here’s a quote:

"One significant finding that may be relevant to the training of high-level athletes was revealed in a number of studies.1, 2, 4, 25 In these four studies, homogenous groups of highly-trained athletes with similar and high VO2 max were used as the subjects. For all four studies the mean VO2 max for the athletes ranged from a minimum of 53 ml/kg/min to a mximum of 60.4 ml.kg/min. All studies revealed that there was either a very low to low-moderate correlation between aerobic fitness and performance in HIIE. This may suggest that once an athlete has reached some base level of aerobic fitness, that further increasing aerobic fitness or conditioning may not significantly increase HIIE performance."

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